TikTok Influencer Marketing is one of the most underpriced marketing avenues. Thanks to TikTok’s rapid rise to popularity there are still fewer brands competing for influencers meaning influencers are charging significantly below market value for sponsored video posts.
Tiktok is a new(er) social media platform that has exploded over the past 18 months. The cause of its rapid rise is due to its popularity with gen z (youth born between the mid-1990s and 2010 which contrary to popular belief aren’t actually Millennials). Tiktok relies on short videos made by TikTok creators that are then shown to TikTok users. Tiktok is very much a spiritual successor to Vine. The videos have a maximum length of 60 seconds, and they are served to viewers in rapid fashion. Each TikTok user is served content based on their interests, and TikTok serves content primarily based on engagement rather than who you follow.
Tiktok has approximately 500 million active users making it one of the top 10 most popular social media platforms and more popular than many staples like Snapchat, Twitter, and Pinterest. Tiktok is very similar to the US-based app Musical.ly which was acquired in 2017 by Bytedance (the owner of TikTok).
The app is frequently one of the most downloaded apps on the app store meaning their active users are constantly growing. Social media marketing hasn’t quite caught up to TikTok meaning that it the perfect social media channel for influencer marketing since attention is fairly underpriced.
How Does TikTok Work?
Tiktok relies on two typical types of people: Tiktok Creators and TikTok viewers. Creators make TikTok videos, and viewers, well, view them. When influencers create video content it is always short-form. This means that it ranges anywhere from a handful of seconds to one minute but never more. The content is then distributed to each influencers target audience (our TikTok Viewers) which is determined by an internal algorithm. The algorithm shows the content to small groups of random users until it develops a good idea of what target audiences like that particular influencer’s content.
The users who are there to just view content have a different experience than most social media networks and video platforms. They start their journey in a feed. The default feed is the suggested feed, not the following feed. Following only shows users content from who users follow while suggested uses all of a user’s engagement data (including who the user follows) to recommend content. Remember this for later because we often need to judge influencer content’s average views as well as the social media influencer’s followers to make sure that they are a good candidate for our brand or product.
Tiktok makes their money like the majority of other social networks. They offer paid ads in-between content; however, their advertising platform is fairly new and often not available for most brands. Most of the marketing on TikTok is influencer marketing campaigns using sponsored videos. The best part is that since Tiktok influencer campaigns are so new the price is often much cheaper than on other rival social platforms.
How to Find Influencers
The most important thing is to find influencers who fit your target audience, create quality content, and can create trending content. If an influencer is missing any of these three things, it means that they are going to be a poor fit for your campaign. The first step to finding an influencer is to think of what your target demographic is interested in. Sometimes this is simple. If you’re a company selling a product target at people who like cooking, you want to find influencers who are in the cooking niche. Once you have ideas of your demographics interests, search them in the search bar.
The search bar has tabs for users, videos, and hashtags. These are the ones that we want to pay attention to. Look through hashtags and videos until you find a user who fits your target audience. If this is your first time doing influencer marketing, it might be better to find multiple influencers getting tens of thousands of views rather than focusing on one large influencer. This lets you figure out different aspects of what makes an influencer a good fit for you. When evaluating an influencer the stats you want to pay attention to are followers, likes, comments, shares, and views.
How to Tell if Influencers Views Are Real
Followers let you know how many actual “fans” they have. This metric needs to be taken with a grain of salt though because the king is going to be views with engagement. That’s because TikTok doesn’t prioritize followers as much as it does the actual quality of the content. Where you’ll be able to weigh it in though is if you can find someone who gets your target number of views consistently with good engagement they will generally have a decent number of followers that coordinates with those other metrics.
The way to make sure that views and followers are real is by looking at the comments and shares. While TikTok won’t let us know what they use to determine how many views a video will get, we know it generally has to do with how many people interact with it and how much watch-time it gets. This means that you can get videos that are very interesting that get thousands of views without anyone actually interacting with the page.Our target influencer should get a good amount of comments that are made by real humans. How do you tell? You read them.
How to Contact Influencers for Your Campaign
Once you’ve picked your influencer or influencers, you need to contact them. TikTok direct messages are not the best method. The best method is to leave TikTok and use other social media platforms: primarily Twitter and Instagram. That’s because they will generally have fewer followers on these platforms meaning its easier to get in contact with them. Sometimes they will have their Instagram linked to their TikTok account, but if they don’t, you’ll have to make liberal use of their name, handle, and the search function. When you get stuck just google: the influencer’s name and Instagram or Twitter. This often will let you find them.
When you message them, keep it short and simple. Let them know your name and your brand. Then just ask them what it would take to get them to make a TikTok video featuring your brand. You generally will also want to have an idea of where the traffic is going to go and how you’re going to keep track of it. One of the simplest ways is to give the influencer a discount. You can also try to negotiate a fee based on performance using the discount (so affiliate commissions rather than a cost per view).
Affiliate Commission versus Flat Rate:
There are pros and cons to affiliate versus flat fee. Affiliate means your guaranteed to never lose money which is why it’s one of the most popular marketing strategies. A flat fee marketing strategy means that if your campaign does extremely well you make more profit. The flat fee method is simple. It’s a flat rate that is contingent upon the influencer meeting a minimum number of views. If they don’t meet the view count, you either don’t pay or have them post an additional video. This is great because it usually means you get extra brand awareness.
Once you’re done negotiating everything is good to go! If you ever want any help with TikTok marketing, feel free to reach out to Fausett Digital. We work with the managers for some of the largest TikTok influencers on the platform consistently meaning we can often give you access to influencers who are guaranteed to perform at great prices.